“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not even the tiniest bit.”

“Watch.”

Tuesday carefully tuned in the Encephalovision through a standard wireless set, but this time without its being connected to Pickwick via the Avian Encephalograph.

“There’s nothing there,” I said, which was true, as only random static danced across the screen.

“Patience, Mum. We have to overstimulate her first.” It was surprisingly easy. While Tuesday showed Pickwick several marshmallows, the Wingco juggled some oranges, and then I, so as not to be simply a casual observer, recited the opening soliloquy to Richard III. Pickwick looked at all of us in turn, blinked twice and then stood stock-still.

“Ah!” said Tuesday. “She’s buffering. Wait for it.” We looked at the screen, and sure enough after about ten seconds there was a fuzzy interpretation of what Pickwick had seen. Juggling, a giant marshmallow and me, walking up and down. There was also more Dukes of Hazzard and her water dish. But then, after ten seconds, it faded. The buffering had ended.

“An ingenious discovery,” I murmured slowly, “but I still can’t see how this fits into the Dark Reading Matter.”

“We think a dodo’s buffered thoughts might be able to transit the Dark Barrier,” said the Wingco, “so all I need to find is an Imaginary Childhood Friend who is about to pass into the DRM with the death of its host and get the ICF to take a dodo with it. The dodo gets overstimulated by what it sees, and we read those buffered thoughts on the Encephalovision back home. It’s really very straightforward.”

“Is it?” I asked, not unreasonably, and both Tuesday and the Wingco went into a complex explanation of how a thing might be possible, which seemed to revolve around the fact that the ICF and the dodo would fuse into a transient state of semifictionalization that would permeate—at least temporarily—the Dark Barrier in two directions.

“I’m a fool not to have seen it myself,” I said, still not understanding it fully, then added, mildly suspicious, “Which dodo?”

“Don’t worry, we won’t use Pickwick,” said Tuesday. “There are plenty of other dodos around, and so long as we get one that is pre-V4 with the old-style brain, we’ll be laughing.”

“Okay, then,” I said as the security gate’s buzzer sounded. “Keep me posted.”

It was Stig outside the gate, so I let him in. He had a cup of tea and talked obsessively about the weather for ten minutes, something that, along with tea and kicking balls about, was very neanderthal, leading some paleontologists to speculate that neanderthal behavior might have somehow crossed over to the English in the distant past.

Millon and Landen came in to listen too, and the reason for Stig’s visit was not long in coming.

“That Synthetic Thursday we retired,” he said. “We made . . . discoveries.”

“Such as?”